It's really easy to quickly outgrow your internal drive if you've got a substantial iTunes library. And, with all that metadata involved, the last thing you want to do is lose your ratings, comments, whatever.

Don't despair. It's actually really easy to move your iTunes library with iTunes itself. That's right: no Finder, no SuperDuper!, no nothing. And iTunes takes care of all the details!

Here's how:

Make sure the drive you want to put the library on is connected. The drive can be a network volume, local volumes, whatever -- just make sure it's mounted and ready to go.

Open iTunes and choose iTunes > Preferences. In the Advanced tab, choose the new location for the library.

At this point, you could stop, and all future music/movies/whatever you add to iTunes will be stored in the new location: in essence, your library will be on more then one drive, and you can repeat the above as the new location fills as well.

But, if you want to move your existing music and videos into the new location:

Choose Advanced > Consolidate Library. iTunes will copy all of the music from all the various previous locations into the new library location you selected above.

When it's done, make sure you're happy with what you've got. You can then delete the old iTunes Music folder in ~/Music/iTunes. But don't delete the iTunes Library or itunes Music Library.xml files: those must remain where they are.

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Another good thing to keep in mind is that you can split up your iTunes library by hand. This is really useful if you’ve got a few movies or TV shows in your iTunes library on your laptop and you want to keep all your music local and always available, but only need access to your movies when you are at home and can plug in.

Just go into the iTunes Music folder and locate the items you want to move (which is really easy to do if you’ve selected to keep it organized), and copy them to another location in the Finder. Then move the old versions from the Music Folder to the trash and empty the trash. DO NOT delete them from within iTunes. Now go and try to play them in iTunes and it’ll complain that it can’t find them and give you a chance to locate them on the external drive.

From now on when you plug into your external drive your movies will be available. Try to play them when you aren’t plugged in and it’ll complain and put an exclamation point next to them until you do plug the drive in. No ratings or metadata are lost and everything new you get will still go in your local library, but those multi-GB movie—or uncompressed music or whatever—will stop taking up precious space on your laptop.